We’ve talked a lot in this podcast about what plagues India’s businesses. ‘Regulatory cholesterol’ is a term that comes up repeatedly. Our guest for this episode is a corporate lawyer who has helped his clients navigate the minefield that is entrepreneurship. Akshay Jaitly, Founding Partner at Trilegal, started out thinking about growth from the Nehruvian lens of redistribution, which was the founding paradigm for our regulatory regime that treats any entrepreneur as a soon-to-be crook. However, his years of experience as a practicing corporate lawyer exposed him to the day-to-day difficulties faced by his clients in trying to navigate through the ‘regulatory cholesterol’. If private investment is going to be the engine of growth, then we can’t have a regulatory regime that is biased towards businesses that succeed or fail based on their ability to manipulate their way through our regulatory systems. We must foster a climate of entrepreneurship that encourages value adding businesses to scale up.

To that end, Akshay shares a whole range of ideas, from the philosophical root causes of our malaise, to decriminalisation, replacing the empty threat of imprisonment with more actionable penalties, to using data for reform. At the core of it all is the fundamental belief that people must be trusted, hence their transactions, with the state and each other, must be smoothened. He also covers the incredible strains on India’s energy sector, and ways to rescue us from the precipice we find ourselves teetering over.